python programming

This article is very insightful for covering mocking in Python. In case you don’t know mocking is a technique for testing where you don’t want to use a particular object or set of objects. For example, you might want to simulate database functionality while you are writing your test cases.

Like this:

I am teaching myself Python. Initially looking at Python, I thought this language is a joke. No curly braces, no end statements, just indentation? REALLY?! No explicit declarations of variables, come on.

But being a patient person, I am giving it a good try. There are some good things about it, after all Google uses it for a lot of their development, as does Youtube. Python has some really nice functional aspects to it (ie. tuples, lists, map reduce/filter) and it is relatively fast for an interpretted language.

Unicode

It has some decent unicode support. One thing that is rather interesting if you want to compare a unicode string with an ASCII string, it will evaluate to true. For example:

>>> s = ‘hello’
>>> u = u’hello’
>>> s == uTrue

Google has a great class that is free for the public if you are interested in. Going through it at your own pace is wonderful, great for a beginner to Python. It was actually developed for their own employees. Thank you Google for providing some great content for the public!!! Yes, that’s right a MS fanboy is praising Google for something, it’s that good! Found below here:

Testing Python Modules

Here is something interesting, modules are objects. This is really, really cool because you can access attributes for the module. So why does this get me excited. Because it allows for some great testing of the functions. It makes test driven development very easy. At the end of your script you can test your code just by running the module. Once the module passes the tests you have set up, the module is ready to be used in another module. This is accomplished like this:

I am starting to teach myself Python and if you are reading this, then you might be learning it to. Good for you! Its a fun language, mainly because of it’s minimal syntax, sorry Perl! I am going to share my resources with you right here. If I missed something that you found useful, let me know I will be happy to post it and I could use the help too!

An interesting note, Python is actually named after Monty Python, not the snake.

START HERE!!!! Google’s Python course (Open Courseware): http://code.google.com/edu/languages/google-python-class/
I recommend going through the entire course and do the exercises. The exercises really will help you get the hang of it! It is a full blown course, video lectures, reading material, and assignments.